The power and capacity of computing components such as microprocessors and memory circuits has been increasing for the last 50 years, as the size of the functional units, such as transistors, has been decreasing. This trend is now reaching a limit, however, as it is difficult to make the current functional units (such as MOSFETs) any smaller without affecting their operation.
Developments are ongoing to implement new types of processing apparatus that can implement more powerful computations than current processors, using different approaches. For example, quantum processors are being developed which can perform computations according to the rules of quantum mechanics. Approaches to quantum processors have been developed and described in a number of earlier patents, including U.S. Pat. No. 6,472,681 (Kane), U.S. Pat. No. 6,369,404 (Kane), U.S. Pat. No. 7,732,804 (Hollenberg et al) and U.S. Pat. No. 7,547,648 (Ruess et al.). The disclosure of each of these documents is incorporated herein by reference. Such advanced processing apparatus promise computational paradigms beyond current devices.
One of the challenges to design a performing adiabatic quantum computing architecture is to have a relatively large amount of qubits which can be individually and simultaneously controllable and also coupled to each other.